I’m all for the continuous roil of the Internet. After all, time is continuous, so why should information be punctuated? But I wonder what it would be like if a site that consists of continuous inputs worked toward a moment when an edition is published.

This is not a well-worked-out idea, but imagine a site like Reddit or a service like Twitter that decides that every day at, say, 5pm Eastern Standard Time (it’s where I live and it’s my hypothesis) it will publish an edition that contains the best of that day’s content as determined by some crowdsourced methodology: upvotes or retweets or some such.

Of course we could do that already: every day just pluck out the most upvoted contents and declare them to be an edition. So, for this idea to be more than a mere aggregating, there would have to be consequences to not making it into the edition. The idea is that the contributors would be competing for the limited space on the front page. The items that didn’t make it would be preserved but taken out of the roil. It would thus change not only the rhythm but also the social dynamic.

Maybe for the worse. I don’t know. That’s why we have the phrase “I wonder…”

Tomorrow, a 100-year-old Norwegian time capsule is going to be opened. (Here’s the Norwegian link, or, see Reddit.) It could be interesting, but my main reaction is: Just a hundred years?

My time scale has shifted.

This may simply be because I’m almost two-thirds of the way through a hundred years. But maybe not.

We’ve got good enough at preservation that it’s hard for me to imagine that there’s anything in that time capsule that will teach us something new, other than what Norwegians in 1912 thought would be interesting to preserve. And for time capsules created these days, I assume our future fellows will just look up the contemporaneous posts about the content. The past becomes less distant when you can just google its wave front.

Designed by Danny Hillis, the Clock is designed to run for ten millennia with minimal maintenance and interruption. The Clock is powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight as well as the people that visit it. The primary materials used in the Clock are marine grade 316 stainless steel, titanium and dry running ceramic ball bearings. The entire mechanism will be installed in an underground facility in west Texas.

I know about link rot, and I’ve lived through enough technological change to see how quickly data becomes inaccessible because its required hardware is in the scrap heaps. I know that in a hundred years we may have killed ourselves off, and we may have continued with policies that turn the Internet into nothing but cable tv. So, I’m not making a prediction about the future. What I’m saying is that living on an open Net with indefinite capacity has changed my time scale. The Net can do a hundred years in a gulp. Ten thousand years is the new century.

Time Magazine’s choice of Person of the Year is meaningless as data, but meaningful as metadata. Picking one person as the most influential in a year is almost always just silly. No one takes it seriously except as a signifier of broader cultural currents.

This year it’s Mark Zuckerberg. That seems to me to be one of the many reasonable choices Time could have made. But I have two meta-comments.

1. I’m glad that Time took MZ over Julian Assange. Facebook is truly influential and important. WikiLeak’s importance is primarily symbolic, and it has been given that symbolic importance mainly by forces that want to use it as justification for killing what they don’t like about the Internet â€” its openness, its bottom-uppity character, its distrust of extrinsic controls…in other words, all that makes it the Internet.

2. The contrast the Time article draws between MZ and the portrait of him in The Social Network (a movie I did not care for) will, I hope, hurt the movie’s chances at the Oscars. It makes vandalism of Wikipedia’s biographies of living people look bush league.